Newsweek's May 12 cover story, "She Works, He Doesn't," raised a lot of eyebrows in the Bay Area. It's no secret our economy's not faring too well -- California's unemployment rate grew to 6.6 percent in March 2003, while locally, 5.7 percent of San Franciscans and 8.4 percent of San Jose residents are unemployed.

With the economy showing no signs of turning around anytime soon and unemployment still growing, more and more families are forced to live on one income. The difference these days? Newsweek nailed it: More and more often, families are living on her income, not his.

Special circumstances here in the Bay Area make this phenomenon particularly prevalent.

Steve Bourne, who formerly worked at Lucent, goes to school full time to earn his engineering degree, while his wife supports them. "There are a lot of people in this situation in the Silicon Valley, what with the layoffs," says Bourne. "The technology field had more men than women in it. So now the men are laid off and the women are still working. It's rough, for a lot of people."

Exact statistics on how many Bay Area women are the sole financial support of their household are hard to pin down -- neither the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) nor the nation's Census Bureau tracks these figures locally. Nationwide, however, the BLS reports that the wife works while her husband doesn't in about 5.6 percent of married couples.

But Stephanie Coontz, national co-chair of the Council on Contemporary Families and author of "The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap," says, "That figure is low for areas where men have been disproportionately laid off, which is certainly the case where many men were in the tech community." That statistic also doesn't take into account the thousands of laid-off tech workers who have gone freelance. Even if they're not getting work, they're not considered unemployed.

Still, most experts agree that more women these days are outearning their husbands, and many are their family's sole source of income. The BLS found that 24 percent of working wives earn more than their working husbands. Add that figure to the almost 6 percent of working women married to unemployed men and you've got an amazing statistic -- almost one out of three married women make more than their husbands do.

Coontz says these kinds of numbers represent a "huge and historic" change in the gender roles of married people.

"Women have entered the labor force in greater numbers and are taking on jobs where they make salaries equal to men's," she adds. "At the same time, this most recent recession has meant men have lost jobs and are experiencing a fall in real wages. Increasingly, women have financial clout equal to or greater than their husband's -- and this is changing relationships in all sorts of interesting ways."

Some of those changes are very good, according to the couples I talked to. Now that the go-go-go work economy has cooled, couples who used to work long hours now have more time together. Caryn Pollock, who sells new homes for a builder in the South Bay area, is married to Steve Bourne.

"I love having him home more!" says Pollock. "We see each other much more now than when we were both working all the time. We have a life together again."

Many couples with children have decided, too, that an unemployed husband equals an opportunity for a stay-at-home parent. He watches the kids while she goes to work, meaning the kids get more love and affection and the parents don't have to shell out for pricey day care.

Ron Key is a San Francisco editor and writer who used to work for TechTV. When he found himself unable to find a job in the City despite "jumping on everything even remotely suitable on craigslist" and "intensive networking," he and his wife, Follin, decided the time was right for Follin to work while Ron stayed home with newborn son Alex.

"I was certainly looking for work throughout much of the pregnancy, but the closer we got to the delivery date, the lack of job opportunities plus the cost of day care made us both think I should stay home with Alex," says Key, who mentions that Bay Area day care costs more than $1,000 a month. "Having Alex go through these first few months with a family member at home is priceless. And I'm a lot less anxious being out of work with something important like this to do."

His wife adds, "It's almost like Ron not getting a job gave us an opportunity to think about what was best for our child."

Note the word opportunity. According to some experts, the couple's choice to define the loss of a job as the gain of a chance to try something new was the key factor in determining happiness.

Randi Minetor, author of "Breadwinner Wives and the Men They Marry: How to Have a Successful Marriage While Outearning Your Husband," interviewed 60 couples for her 2002 book. She says the majority of the interviewees were happy with a female sole earner.

"Obviously, it depends on the relationship itself, but in a lot of cases, the men I interviewed saw being laid off as an opportunity to pursue something different," says Minetor. "A lot of them saw a chance to be an at-home dad, to change careers, to go back to school, to take a job that makes them feel good rather than taking a job that's all about the money."

Pollock agrees: "When we saw how many people in tech were being laid off in the Bay Area, we knew Steve's losing his job was a strong possibility. We started planning how we were going to handle a transition, and we saw an opportunity for him to change careers, for him to work on getting a job that he really wanted. We would never have had that opportunity when he and I were both making great bucks and working full time."

Of course, not every couple is delighted when the female half works while the male half doesn't. Many couples are thrown into this situation unwillingly, when the man loses a job and just can't find another.

"In recent years, having a wife work while a husband doesn't is kind of a default situation," says clinical psychologist Stephen Goldbart, co-founder of the Money, Meaning and Choices Institute, based in the Marin County town of Kentfield, which helps clients deal with the psychological strains of finances. "One party loses a job, while the other still has one. That can create a lot of tension."

Arguments can arise over almost any issue, but one key area of stress is housework. Most women don't think men do enough of it, even when he's the full-time home caretaker.

Minetor says many of the couples she interviewed had problems in this area. Husbands who already feel that their status as the man of the house is compromised when they're not working are unwilling to do anything that could be construed as "women's work."

"The wife will ask, 'Can you get dinner on the table?" and he'll say, 'No,' and what he means is, 'That will make me feel weak,'" says Minetor. "While 51 percent of the men I interviewed said they were the primary housekeeper, I found that men tend to overreport the amount of housework they actually do."

Marcella Rensi is a transportation planner in San Jose who's married to an independent-contractor software engineer whose work opportunities have been spotty for the last two years. She says there are nice things about her husband's being home much of the time ("There's always someone to go to the post office!") but that they tend to argue about the housework.

"There hasn't seemed to be a commensurate increase in housework with the decrease in paid work, and it can lead one to [me] feeling a little screwed," says Rensi, who adds that she works all day and wants to come home to a clean house and dinner.

"Women still do most of the housework," says Joan DiFuria, who co-founded the Money, Meaning and Choices Institute with Stephen Goldbart. "Men do a little bit and think they do half, but that's not the way it really is. It's a pretty raw deal for working women."

"For men, it's something of a power struggle," says Goldbart. "In our society, we still tend to equate what we do with who we are, and if a man isn't working, he doesn't feel very manly, so he's not going to do anything else that makes him feel even less manly."

So an argument over, say, who's going to do the dinner dishes taps into deep and painful issues around gender roles, work and self-worth.

"We find it goes back to primitive nature," says DiFuria. "Men want to be the provider. It's their reason for being."

"For men, what it means to be male and successful hasn't changed much even in the liberal Bay Area," says Goldbart. "Traditional gender roles are deeply held. Maybe 500 years from now, we'll evolve out of this, but people don't change that rapidly. When a man is supposed to be the provider and can't provide, it's no surprise that the woman looks at him and sees him as an unsuccessful partner. Women have more freedom in their roles these days, but men just don't."

And that can lead to men feeling insecure about their role. Who are they, if they're not an engineer or a manager or a software developer? And how are they supposed to relate to a wife who's taken on what feels like his role?

"It's certainly strange in social circles," says Ron Key. "I don't know what to say when someone asks what I do."

"When I see a couple where the man's not working while his wife is, nine out of 10 will say their main issue is what to tell people when they don't want to say, 'I lost my job and I don't know what I'm doing next,'" says DiFuria. "They feel less masculine and very bad about it."

These types of traditional gender roles, however, are more mutable in the Bay Area, where people tend to be liberal on a whole spectrum of issues and certainly more forgiving of nontraditional people of all stripes, including those that don't conform to traditional gender roles. The couples interviewed for this article didn't seem to have issues with their unconventional gender roles.

"We've always been independent thinkers," says Steve Bourne, who sums it up best. "We don't group things into 'women's work' and 'men's work.' If the vacuuming needs to get done, whoever has the time to do it will do it. We care more about things just getting done than making rules about who has to do what."

Obviously, not every couple is so lucky, but it's a safe bet to assume more couples here are less freaked out when a man ties on an apron or a woman straps on a work belt than in other, more conservative areas of the country.

Complicating these murky, often unconscious ideas about gender propriety are, of course, money issues. The Bay Area is expensive. It's hard to make ends meet on one salary, period.

"In a place as expensive as the Bay Area, it's really rough not to be contributing economically," says Ron Key. "You look at what it costs to live here, and you realize how much American culture prompts males to take on the responsibility for making that living. As much as I like being here with Alex, it's hard to sit with our financial planner and realize there are certain things we just can't do."

Typical financial steps such as owning a house, saving for retirement, contributing to a college savings fund, owning a new car -- these are things families took for granted in the heat of the tech boom. Now, many of them are giving up these kinds of "luxuries."

"We worry about retirement," says Follin Key. "We worry that we're throwing our money away every month on rent. We're making it for now, but the future -- that's a little scary."

"My greatest fear is losing my job, too," says Marcella Rensi. "That would mean no income. We do have some savings, but it's a real fear for me."

Given that the Bay Area's economy isn't expected to improve anytime soon, an awful lot of couples are going to have to live with that kind of insecurity -- and learn to live on one salary.

"So many people are in technology in this area, and tech has had these huge ups and downs, always," says Rensi, whose mother was a technology worker back in the 1970s. "It's like being a migrant worker, only you're in an office instead of out in a lettuce field. I expect that anyone in tech is always going to be insecure."

"When we knew I was going to be unemployed, we made plans," says Bourne. "We sold our house in Southern California and moved to a house with a lower mortgage in Northern California. We paid off the cars. We reduced our expenses to about a third of what they were before. And I'm not buying as many toys as I used to."

And if one half of your couple is out of work, with little hope of finding a new job, a healthy way to deal with the situation is to be flexible. If your old job isn't coming back, the best chance you can give yourself -- and your intimate relationships -- for success is to look to the future and see what you can do now to put yourself in the place you'd eventually like to be.

"I know a guy who was a senior manager at a tech company," says Stephen Goldbart. "He was making great money. He's been laid off for two years now, and he's still waiting for the dream to come back while his savings dribble away. There are a whole lot of people, particularly in the Silicon Valley, who are sitting around waiting for things to get better when they should be working on creating new opportunities for themselves."